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Teddy Roosevelt Failed to Save the GOP From Its Crazies in 1912

A century ago, the Republican Party chose to become a permanent minority, not wittingly or directly but inevitably. It spent most of the succeeding decades trying without great success to overcome its mistake. Today’s GOP is at a similar crossroads that could take it into the political wilderness for years to come.

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The Republican Party’s embattled moderates finally seem to recognize that possibility, as seen in an extraordinary series of blunt statements this week from House Speaker John Boehner. “Frankly,” Boehner said Thursday, ripping into the hardline outside groups that sought to scuttle a budget compromise with Democrats, “I think they’re misleading their followers. I think they’re pushing our members in places where they don’t want to be.” Fifty right-wing groups put out a statement in response, complaining that “the conservative movement has come under attack on Capitol Hill.”

As they pick sides, Republicans would do well to study the 1912 presidential election, which was the last time their party faced a similar dilemma. That campaign is remembered as a gift to the Democratic nominee. Like Abraham Lincoln before him, Woodrow Wilson owed his election to a split in the majority party. When Republicans divided their vote almost equally between William Howard Taft, their party’s nominee, and Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose Party candidate, Wilson slipped into office with 42 percent of the vote. That defeat was forgotten in the elections of 1920, 1924, and 1928 when the Republican nominees—Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover—cruised to landslide victories.

The deeper story of 1912, however, was the Republican Party’s rebuff of its moderate wing. Roosevelt challenged his party to embrace the Progressive movement, which had taken aim at the business trusts that were exploiting markets and labor. Factories were unregulated hell holes where children and adults worked six days a week in unsafe conditions. “We Republicans,” said Roosevelt, must “hold the just balance and set ourselves . . . resolutely against improper corporate influence.”

Ignoring Roosevelt’s plea to reject “crooked business” and embrace “the general right of the community,” the 1912 Republican Party Convention sided instead with proponents of unfettered capitalism, even to the extent of purging the progressives from its leadership ranks. Although they continued to call themselves Republicans, many felt unwelcome in the party, and several, including Henry Stimson and Harold Ickes, later served in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Democratic administration.

When Hoover, because of his party’s commitment to the principles of laissez-faire capitalism, refused to use the power of government to relieve the poverty and unemployment wrought by the Great Depression, his party lost its hold on the House in 1930 and on the Senate and the presidency in 1932. As Kristi Anderson’s The Creation of a Democratic Majority shows, first-time voters in the 1930s came to identify with the Democratic Party by a two-to-one margin, making it the nation’s majority party and enabling it to dominate national politics through the 1970s.

The GOP had picked the wrong side of history and had misjudged the dynamics of a two-party system. These dynamics can be easily misunderstood today in the midst of our polarized politics. The political center is weak, most clearly in the Congress but also in our elections. Efforts to turn out the partisan vote have trumped efforts to woo the shrinking number of swing voters. One might assume that a permanent majority can be constructed on the right or on the left.